- published: 03 Sep 2012
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Chestnut is a color, a medium reddish shade of brown (displayed right), and is named after the nut of the chestnut tree.
Indian red is a similar but separate and distinct color from chestnut.
Chestnut is also a very dark tan that almost appears brown.
The name chestnut derives from the color of the nut of the chestnut tree. The first recorded use of chestnut as a color term in English was in 1555. The color maroon is also named after the chestnut (via French marron).
Deep chestnut is the color called chestnut in Crayola crayons. This color was also produced in a special limited edition in which it was called Vermont maple syrup.
At the request of educators worried that children (mistakenly) believed the name represented the skin color of Native Americans, Crayola changed the name of their crayon color "Indian Red", originally formulated in 1958, to "Chestnut" in 1999. In reality, the color Indian red has nothing to do with American Indians but is an iron oxide pigment the use of which is popular in India.
Color (American English) or colour (Commonwealth English) is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, blue, yellow, etc. Color derives from the spectrum of light (distribution of light power versus wavelength) interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors. Color categories and physical specifications of color are also associated with objects or materials based on their physical properties such as light absorption, reflection, or emission spectra. By defining a color space colors can be identified numerically by their coordinates.
Because perception of color stems from the varying spectral sensitivity of different types of cone cells in the retina to different parts of the spectrum, colors may be defined and quantified by the degree to which they stimulate these cells. These physical or physiological quantifications of color, however, do not fully explain the psychophysical perception of color appearance.
The science of color is sometimes called chromatics, colorimetry, or simply color science. It includes the perception of color by the human eye and brain, the origin of color in materials, color theory in art, and the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the visible range (that is, what we commonly refer to simply as light).